


Without a country

by pr_scatterbrain



Series: Model au [2]
Category: Bandom, Fashion RPF, Hip Hop RPF, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, F/M, Gen, Model AU, always-a-girl!Spencer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/pseuds/pr_scatterbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterward the VMAs, his friends call him and tell him to leave America.</p>
<p>The Kanye West: Fendi intern fic (which is cannon).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without a country

**Author's Note:**

> Set: 2009, post VMA rant (and just when Ryan and Spencer are starting to get back into contact with each other in the first part of my model au, Alright (Still))
> 
> Notes: [Apparently Kanye West interned at Fendi.](http://fashionbombdaily.com/2010/10/21/kanye-interned-at-fendi-during-6-month-music-sabbatical/) My mind went places.

 

 

Afterwards –

(But not before everything that’s going to happen, happens).

Afterwards, his friends call him and tell him to leave America.

They tell him to get out. They tell him he needs to get out. To get out while he still can. To run. Because he fucked up the blonde, blue eyed, all American girl-next-door’s ‘moment’ and they will make him pay for that (fuck, even the fucking President of the United States hates him). Maybe he stays. Maybe he apologises. Maybe he calls her and maybe she accepts it. Maybe he does all the things he should(n’t have had to do if he wasn’t stupid and drunk and bored and many other things that Fox News anchors and E! news announcers are all giving a name too and call it out on their airwaves to millions and billions of people). But maybe it doesn’t mean shit. The reruns keep playing and Obama calls him a jackass and –

He listens.

He packs his shit together and gets out.

He gets out of L.A, then he gets out of America. But once he’s out, he doesn’t know what to do. Lupe calls him while he’s in Japan a few times. He would though. Kanye thinks about recording a new album. He has ideas (he always had ideas). He talks to Lupe about a few of them. Lupe hums and occasionally comments on them. Kanye writes down a few notes on the back of some old receipts he finds at the bottom of his bag.

They’re old and faded.

Lupe is saying something, but Kanye squints, trying to pick out the date on them. He can’t. They’re that old.

He looks at them. Looks at the faded ink and the yellowing paper.

Maybe he should get a new bag.

It sounds like a good idea. Going to Italy feels like a better one. In his first class seat, he looks out the window at the runway. Nothing looks especially notable. He looks away and texts Amber for a while. When the plane starts to gear up for take off, he switches his phone off. When he’s allowed to turn it back on, Amber calls him after a few moments.

“I thought something had happened,” she tells him, sounding worried.

He (wonders what could have happened) tells her he’s on a plane. He tells her, he’s going to Rome.

She hums a little.

They talk for a while. He keeps her on the line for longer than he should. She lets him, lets him draw out the conversation and ask for details and just ask more from her. He – he takes as much as she will give him. But he always has when it comes to her.

“Maybe you can come and visit me,” he offers at the end of the call.

“Maybe,” she replies, which isn’t a no or a yes, but he could make it into either. Which isn’t fair. But it is true.

That is where they leave it.

Three hours later he’s in Rome. It’s humid and hot. Summer. But not like he has ever known it. He gets his assistant to book him into a hotel and once he’s checked in, he searches through his luggage for the right pair of sunglasses to wear. He can’t find them. He’s pretty sure his assistant could. Maybe he should have brought her.

Jet lagged, he feels like sleeping.

Instead he goes to Louis Vuitton, because he figures he’s come this far already. But once he’s there, standing in the flagship store, staring at everything, he can’t decide what he wants. He picks up a wallet and looks at messenger bags and thinks about changing his look. He thinks about buying them. Or a new jacket, one of the leather and sheering ones they have on display. But when he tries it on, he feels out of date. The new collection is set to be released soon.

He goes back to his hotel room with only one new wallet and three belts.

In his suite, he cracks open a bottle of water and drinks it in one go. Though he’d only been outside for an hour at the most and spent most of it in a car or in Louis Vuitton, his clothes stick to his skin. The air conditioning makes him shiver. On his phone there are about two dozen messages. His inbox has more. He sits down and goes through them all.

They mostly say the same thing.

 

 

There is a saying. There are a great of them. But there is one which says the more things change, the more they stay the same.

That about covers it.

 

 

The city is empty of inhabitants. In droves, tourists replace them. He doesn’t know what to do, so he keeps moving. Keeps busy. Or he tries. Except he can’t. Not really. Not like he wants.

“It’ll pass,” Amber tells him, calmly.

He tries to listen because she usually speaks with more sense than all of the people he knows put together. He thinks about buying her a plane ticket but doesn’t really get around to doing it. His assistant sends him stuff to sign and stuff to approve. Jay Z calls a few times. Beyoncé too.

She tells him it’ll be alright.

“Amber said that.”

“She’s right,” Beyoncé agrees.

It won’t be forgotten though. It never will.

“No,” Beyoncé says, because she knows how things are for people like them. “It won’t.”

And that’s how things are. For a while at least.

Then one day he turns on his laptop to find an email from Fendi in his inbox, just waiting to be opened.

So that’s what he does. One click. Open sesame.

And then there it is. An offer. An opportunity. If he wants it. If he wishes to make it one.

He looks at the email and rereads it and even then he doesn’t know what to make of it. He doesn’t know what to do with himself either, so he supposes it can’t hurt to look at it a little longer. Think about it and consider what they offer. So he does and when he finishes he calls someone who will be able to give some sound advice.

“It might be good for you,” Marc Jacobs tells Kanye.

In the background, Kanye hears some swearing and yelling. Marc must be at work.

For a period, Marc always used to be at work. Now he isn’t. (It’s better now).

“Sorry,” Marc says, “It’s crazy this time of the year.”

“Yeah,” Kanye replies.

Marc laughs; he sounds tired and half distracted. “Seriously, you should do it.”

So Kanye says yes. Yes, and allows his routine to change, and become not his own, but one determined by others. On the following Monday, he gets up at seven, showers, dresses and eats. He takes him time walking to work. There aren’t that many paparazzi in Italy. Not compared to L.A. He walks by the river. He arrives early. He arrives early and sits and waits for the head of the intern program to fetch him.

He is asked to get coffee. He is asked to make copies of paperwork.

He gets used to it.

At lunch, he goes out with some of the other interns and designers and eats in the sunshine. Quietly he works on picking up a few phrases of Italian. He stops checking his phone. Then he puts it away. People email him still, a few call him on the hotel’s landline.

“This must be costing you a fortune,” Kanye says, when Amber rings him.

She laughs.

 

 

Amber laughs at him a lot. That was one of the first thing he liked about her.

 

 

Once, Karl Lagerfeld takes Kanye out to lunch.

He and Baptiste Giabiconi, and Kanye go and eat in restaurant near Fendi and Karl talks about the world. He blunt and bias and speaks like a man who is in the practice of saying whatever he wishes to say. He makes Kanye laugh and he corners Kanye into answering questions he’d rather not answer. Kanye isn’t sure he likes Karl. But he isn’t sure that matters.

In the middle of their lunch, Karl is distracted by the entrance of a silver haired gentleman, and a tall blonde.

“I was going to have her in my show,” he says, the edges of his tone sharply flippant.

Across from him, Kanye watches Baptiste roll his eyes.

“You can still photograph her,” he says absently, taking a sip of his wine.

Karl turns and watches. His eyes focus on Baptiste’s throat, watching his Adams apple bob as he swallows. Baptiste flicks his eyes over Karl. Kanye – Kanye looks over at the girl and the gentleman she is sitting with. The man is a gentleman. Kanye doesn’t need to look the cut of his suit or the manner he helped the girl into her chair, to know it. There is something about her, he thinks. He does not know what.

He isn’t sure why Karl would want to hire her.

Baptiste catches his glaze when Kanye turns back to their table. He still looks bored.

 

 

Everyone looks bored. (But it’s better to look bored than be boring. Right?)

 

 

Slowly, he finds himself getting used to his job.

Some days he runs around, taking messages and doing errands for members of the design team, other days they take him down to meet the seamstresses. Despite Marc’s best efforts, Kanye doesn’t know as much as he probably should. The ladies in their white coats laugh and say things to quickly for him to pick up, but with wrinkled hands that do not shake or wobble, they teach him about fabric, cut and about construction. They teach him how to sew buttons properly and let him watch them bring a sketch to life. They listen too, when he talks and give him answers when he asks questions. Sometimes the answers they give are short, or limited by their comprehension of English. Always though, they answer him to the best of their abilities.

The design team do too, when he is allowed to work with them. But oddly, he mostly finds himself listening. He watches as they work and he pays attention when they talk about it. They speak about colour and they talk about shape and they talk about inspiration and the ‘Fendi Woman’ and he take note and when they ask (only when they ask), he offers ideas, because suddenly he has them.

He always has ideas. Always did.

Yet now when he lays them out to be considered by the designers, it is together they are unfolded and considered.

“What is this?” he gets used to be asked, and, “Why is this like it is?”

Question after question. At first he doesn’t understand. At first he bristles. The answers he gives are short. Often a certain sharpness in his tone accompanies them. But that is at first. Slowly, one question at a time leads into to a dialogue being commenced. One discussion leads into another. Afterwards, on his walk back to his hotel he replays them in his mind and reconsiders his opinions and theirs, forming arguments for and against each. At night, when some of the other interns invite him out, he speaks to them about it all and they laugh at him but they talk back. They make him explain himself. Explain the visions in his head. Articulate them into something they can not only see, but understand. They challenge him. They all do. Though he is tired in the mornings, he is never late to work.

Some of his ideas end up being discarded. But others are drafted and refined. Some take a life outside the paper they are written down upon. One or two even survive long enough to become prototypes. He’s made many other things in his life. But none quite like the garments hanging in the Fendi showroom.

 

 

He’s made many things in his life. But those garments are perhaps the ones he’s most proud of. (And they don’t even have his name on them).

 

 

Right before he finishes his internship, Fashion Week in New York begins.

He isn’t there to see it though. Fendi is crazy. Everyone is running around with something to do or some last minute detail to perfect. It’s all parties and work and no sleep and in the middle of it, Karl (Karl who doesn’t just have Fendi’s show to design, but Chanel and his own too), asks him to host a party for Fendi.

On the morning of it – when Kanye is racing around making sure everything is running smoothly, he sees the girl again, all legs, flawless skin, and electric blue eyes.

From within his car, he sees her give her handbag to her driver. In a rush, he remembers. Valentino. The girl is the face of Valentino. No. This girl is Valentino’s muse, and today is his anniversary show. In the somewhat grey light, he watches as the driver opens her door. There is still something fragile about her. Something worn so very thin. But as she steps off the curb, the sunlight catches her and illuminates her. Instantly something about the angles and long slender lines of her body and the way the light skates over them changes into something else. Someone else.

He – he sees what Karl saw.

He blinks. And he doesn’t know why he didn’t see it before. Didn’t know how he possibly couldn’t.

 

 

 


End file.
